constraint

During one of the recent (and frequent) screenings of Top Gun in our house, I was thinking about innovation. I had just finish a popular post for our company’s blog about the habits of the most innovative engineers and I began to draw parallels between Maverick’s journey and innovation.

Sustainability is one of the key emerging trends in recent years. But much like innovation, it is a maturing discipline with few established business practices and lots of evolving methodologies. Sustainability champions at organizations often face the same challenges that innovation champions do: lack of senior level buy-in, lack of process, lack of resources. The benefits of successful sustainability and successful innovation are similar, as well: a competitive advantage, improved profit margins, and better brand sentiment from employees and customers.

They say creativity loves constraint. In fact, if you ask professional, creative people about their “limitations” they naturally see them as exciting and stimulating. Engineers and software designers for instance see constraints as absolutely fundamental to problem solving. So why does constraint get such a bad wrap? Why do so many people see them as things to be managed and talked around and spun? In this week’s episode, Adam Morgan delves deep into this topic and explains his process for creating a framework to understand constraint and a process to help people successfully manage it.